At various points in time, I have tried out various palmtop computers; none have so far proven to be as versatile as pencil and paper. The major problems tend to be:
Keyboards that are too small for adult fingers are not convenient;
Screens too small to contain significant amounts of information are not convenient;
Pen and paper represents a data representation method of almost infinite flexibility; computerized PDAs require more rigid data representations that typically cripples their utility.
There are lots of nifty desktop-computer-based scheduling packages with a plethora of features. They conquer the limitations of the palmtops, unfortunately, they all have the crippling deficiency that they can't remind you anything when you're not at your computer.
I used to use a Franklin Dayplanner. Rather than using the "phone book" that they provide, I periodically print up pages typeset using a document class called addressbk.cls that I wrote up some years ago for LaTeX. I keep a (periodically synchronized-between-home-and work) information list in LaTeX form online, and gradually mark it up with changes. It's not a perfect method, but it has worked fairly well.
Status:
March 20, 1997
Built structure for l2v program to extract vCards from LaTeX document using addressbk.cls.
March 25, 1997
Wrote team2vcf to convert Lotus Notes export of team list into a vCard file.
March 25, 1997
l2v produces very nearly correct results; requires only minor filtering code to take out backslashes where (for TeX) special characters required backslashes.
March 26, 1997
Fixed handling of Doctors and Professors and married people; changed the name to latex2vcf.
March 27, 1997
There's a bug again with married folk. It now looks up time zone and latitude/longitude based on reasonable guesses of one's city based on address, telephone number area codes, and company names, which is quite cool. The list of cities is pretty limited, but I don't know people in that many cities...
vCard (Extended Bus. Crd. fmt), vCalendar (Scheduler protocol) These two protocols are in the process of being standardized through the IETF as protocols for general Internet use for exchange of personal data and personal scheduling data.
Microsoft representatives have of course claimed that this represents ""Microsoft is actively helping to define these standards within the IETF. Submission of specifications such as vCard and vCalendar to the IETF is an important first step in this standards definition process.""
Which sounds like a really spin-doctored take on it all. Probably about six months from now, Microsoft will introduce a "value added" API (implementing a non-specified Microsoft "internal trade secret" protocol similar to but incompatible with these ones), adds in ActiveX support (so that remote users can format your hard drive or other nefarious things), and then claim to the rest of the world that they invented the notion of scheduling personal tasks over the Internet.
A vendor of vCard/vSchedule products for Intranet-based scheduling for workgroups.
Narval - Intelligent Personal Assistant Framework
A project to allow several messaging protocols (POP, IMAP, MS Exchange) to work together. The plan is to provide a cross-platform way for people to use mail, scheduling, and time-management systems.
This is a rather sophisticated time management package that runs under MS-Windows, and functioned reasonably well under WINE as of October 1997. Offers nice features for juggling tasks into a feasible schedule. Of any desktop-based package, I think I like this one the best.
If it could read and write vSchedule information, thus making it interoperable with other software (generally speaking), it would be even better. It would be similarly superior if it could talk to PDAs like the 3Com Pilot
The classic source of personal scheduling systems.
CAL63 for Atari ST
This package has an exemplary user interface for describing event repetition. The author disclosed the data structures so that one could write one's own programs to manipulate events.
A work tracker
A tool that monitors what you are typing, and uses Beagle to search your documents for others that may be related
A diary system implemented using Mono
Taskspace - a two-dimensional todo-list manager - implemented in Tcl/Tk.